WHAT COMES AFTER THE END OF THIS

Chapter 63

Chapter 63

Yrene's PoV

"Hey baby."
"Hey." He kisses my lips in a sweet long kiss,
"Miss me?"
"Hmmm... Let me think." With a finger tapping on my chin, I pretended to be in deep thought. But not for long. Jason picks me up, gripping me around the waist and put me over his shoulder as he ran around the house making angry monster growls while I laughed in short hysteric bursts at his childish play.
"Stop!" I screamed in between fits of giggles as he threw me onto my bed before lightly lunging onto my body.
"So, did you miss me?" His hands were travelling up and down my sides and when the went under my tank top a little I knew exactly where this was going.
"No!" I shrieked before he started tickling me relentlessly; he always tickled me to get me to answer him even when he knew what I was going to say anyways.
"Say yes." He continued tickling my stomach like the jerk he was; beautiful forest green eyes alight with amusement, perfect full lips stretched into a full blown smile and black hair messy in an undeniably hot manner.
I couldn't lie to him; not when looking into those green eyes that I had first fallen in love with.
"Yes!" I managed to get out between my cackling laughter. His hands immediately stilled as he gave me one of his signature smiles before kissing me senseless. Day turned to night and he climbed into bed beside me but when I went to go in for a hug my arms closed around empty air.

Cold sweat broke on my brow, my breathing heavily laboured and tears rolled down my cheeks in hoards. Jason wasn't here. He had never been here. How could he be here? They had buried him already and I hadn't even gone to the funeral, the pain of having lost him had paralysed me for days. He had been my crutch, my getaway drug and now he had left me alone; crippling and as an addict with no means of release. Crying a river, i went to my washroom, digging out my cigarettes from where I had hidden them since last Friday when I got them, two weeks after Jason's death, I lit one up. One turned into two, two into three, three into four and after that I lost count of the butts I had tossed into the toilet bowl. Popping a few mints into my mouth to get rid of the smell of smoke as much as possible I washed my face and went down to where I knew Ross would be. Opening the glass door to my father's wine cellar, I went down and sat next to my brother who was sitting cross legged on the wooden floor with his head to the wall; surrounded by age old bottles of wine and spirits.
"I miss him Ross. I miss him too much; I think I'll die of it." I spoke to him as fresh tears made their way down my gaunt cheeks.
"Don't say that Nene, I won't be able to take it if you leave me too. I'm never forgiving that asshole for leaving before me!" He laughed through his own freshly shed tears before sniffling and resting his head on mine; the glass of bourbon laying forgotten next to him.
"Why are you up?"
"Same reason you are."
"Dreams?"
"Nightmares." He answered, head hanging low.
"What did you see?"
"Let's not talk about it." He simply stated but I was as stubborn a girl as he was.
"Ross, we need to talk about it, we can't keep it in." My guilty conscience laughed at the blatant lie I had told, since I never talked about what I really felt like; burying myself in my books and smoking away the sleepless nights had become my normal ever since the Friday when we had lost him; not to mention my blades were back out. I talked to no one and no one wanted to talk to me, for fear of saying something that would hurt me more including Eminem, tattoos, and even the books Jason had introduced to me. And it was true, every time someone mentioned so much as his name even, my heart would feel as if someone was closing their fingers around it tightly or penetrating it with a thousand poisoned daggers at once. My friends had tried talking to me but I had shut them out; the same way I had shut Bear and Chase out, even when both of them had tried talking to me numerous times without giving up, the latter even having returned to keeping a check on my meals for the few days that I went to school before summer break. I had gotten accepted into junior year without having to go through sophomore; I just wanted to get away from this plastic town with plastic people with plastic feelings. Mother has become more of a mother than she had ever been but I couldn't bring myself to care much for I knew she was only doing this to prevent people from thinking of me as a deranged lunatic. She was still occupying my thoughts  before Ross spoke again,
"I-I," his voice was thick and choked with tears, "dreamt that we were going to this party and I was driving with Jason but when we went through the windshield of the car after an abrupt stop I couldn't do anything but stare, the same way I couldn't stop him when he lost control of the wheel. I tried screaming, tried to speak but the words were tied in a tangled knot in my voicebox. And that's when I woke up and came down here."
I kissed his cheek and took the glass from his hands; mixing myself some scotch and whiskey, neat.
"But Nene, how did you know I was here?"
"Intuition. Brother sister thing." I answered with a broken smile, only to receive his mirroring expression and I knew then that he knew too, had remembered Jason's words. He always used to tease us about our bond because I was the one person who always knew where to find Ross when he didn't want to be found and he was the only one who would know what was going on inside my head until I fell in love Jason. My Jason. My no longer present to tease me Jason. Sighing I sat down with my head on Ross's shoulder, downing the tumbler of alcohol with in five seconds before refilling it.
"Mother has really started to care for you, hasn't she?"
"Hmm."
"Why don't you give it a shot? Your relationship with her?"
"Because people change but memories don't. She's put me in a bad place Ross, and I don't think I'll make it out of it, at least not yet but I'll try when I'm ready."
He kissed my forehead softly,
"I know, Nene,  and take your time, I'm not pressuring you for anything."
"You have never pressured me for anything, that's why I love you."
"I love you too."
"I know you do."
"Nene, I know I never said it but I loved both of you together, Jason and you, he treated you well, he made you happy and that made me happy, more than anything. Anyone who knew him could tell he was in love with you and had been for a long time and I knew he made you love you too. I may have disapproved earlier on but soon enough I saw the real him, the him that was mad for you; would do anything for you."
"It's just how it is: everyone I love disappears, they leave me alone. One minute they are there and the next poof," I motion with my hands the sign of a bomb blowing and Ross stares at me with sorrow that couldn't be hidden, "gone. Forever."
"Don't say that. You will soon get love, a lot of love, so much love you won't be able to handle it. I know it. And I will ruin this world if I have to get it for you."
I laugh scornfully at him,
"Ross," I touch his cheek," people like me do not deserve to be loved because the people we do love and touch they end up worse off than ever. You have examples in front of you, I do not deserve anyone's love."
"You do. You deserve the world; Jason would have wanted it for you!"
"Well Jason isn't here anymore!" I scream back, standing back up, hot, angry tears lining my eyes; the idea of having lost such an integral part of my life hitting me with full force once again.
I sit back down and a few minutes later we are joined by Michele in the wine cellar. After fixing herself a scotch she sits down next to Ross and I sit back down next her; all three of our heads leaning against the walls, staring into the depths of an unknown abyss.
"I miss him." Michele is the first to break our mournful silence. "I miss him so fucking much you guys!" She weeps into the sleeve of her silken robe, "It's like having lost my best friend whom I had helped raise like a my own child." She sobs harder and Ross hugs her as her hand moves to her belly.
"Jason was so excited," she speaks through her sorrow, as Ross and I both turn to look at her, "he was so excited to be an uncle." Oh. Wow! I had no idea that Michele was expecting and by the looks of it Ross hadn't known either. And now that he did know, he very carefully takes the tumbler from her hands keeping it next to himself despite her futile protests.
"No, Mishy. Not when there's another life you're nurturing inside of you. You're as much of a sister to me as this retard and I'm not letting you harm yourself. No way."
She only smiles weakly at him and gives him a kiss on the cheek before turning to me,
"You know he was more excited than Raymond and I even when we told him, before he left. And as for you guys we wanted to give you a surprise, we had it all set, the homecoming weekend but some times things do not go as planned and here we are; me breaking the news to you in our wine cellar." She says looking straight at me as if her words held a greater meaning.
"To say it has been a month, it's too much, isn't it? He's been gone for too long." She smiles sadly before continuing, " I can't even tell you how excited he was for us, it only made me think about how happy he would be once you had your own kids, over the moon he'd be." She smiles fondly at me wiping away my tears, "He couldn't be here to witness that happiness but you still can Nene. Don't hinder yourself."
I exchanged no words before getting up, a stream of brand new tears coursing down my face. Careers, marriage, family, love, Jason. All seemed so far away, so foreign, so forgotten and to think that everything I wanted was somehow intertwined with the one person who had ceased to coexist with my pathetic being.

Before going to bed I looked at myself in the mirror: eyes sunken and hollow, lips wan and bloodless, face sallow and gaunt, eyes devoid of spark and their previously bright blue irises now a a greyish colour. Melancholy. That was the one word that came to my mind as i saw the disgusting image portrayed clearly in the looking glass. Pathetic. Undoing my hair from the knot I picked up the scissors from my dresser, sobbing pathetically. Jason had liked my hair open and long and now that he wasn't here all that happened when I let it down were memories of him flooding back, reminding me of how he used to okay with it, knotting it, pulling it p, braiding it. But when I lifted the scissor to my tresses I couldn't bring myself to snap them off. How could I? It was, after all, the hair he had touched and loved. Putting them back into a knot, popping three anti allergic pills to induce slumber I crawled into bed. Crying myself to sleep and only then remembering that it was August almost, Jason would have been twenty had he been with us. The same Jason whose grave I still hadn't been to, the same Jason who had left me all alone.